In the event of my sudden death

October 5, 2006

I just watched a report about the tragic death of some honour student. Rough deal for the kid and his family, I’m not disputing that, but tone of the coverage forced a darkly ironic disengagement from the gravity of the situation. There was this bizarre fixation on the depth of his popularity, and the quality of his grades; almost suggesting had a C student with two friends gotten clipped it would have been a mercy killing.

Every family member, friend, and vague acquaintance spewed the same cookie cutter tribute: “Good grades, everybody liked him.” Not one person said a damn thing about who he was. Not the first song he loved, the people he always wanted to tell off, or some idiosyncratic bullshit that made him happy. In the last moments of his identity they reduced him to a few vague social measurements, negating whatever individual worth he had.

Let me go on record and say, that should I die suddenly, I expect some provocative, slanderous, wildly implausible statements disseminated in my name. The more banal the question, the more absurd and offensive the answer:

Reporter: Tell me something about your friend?

Jay: That guy shit the bed until he was twenty, then he started sleeping on the floor. When we offered to get him some help he would just mumble stuff about how “reporters were all vapid failed actors that traffic in human misery.”

Reporter: How about you Mam, what did AJ love?

Esmeralda: Throwing tiny horses off overpasses and filming the resulting car crashes. Sometimes he would play the tapes at children’s birthday parties.

Reporter: How does it feel to lose a son?

Mom: I take comfort in the fact he is in hell, with all the Chinese he hated so very much.

Reporter: Did he have dreams? Any aspirations?

Rob: The dude just really wanted superpowers.

While dying would suck, the idea of my loved ones being petty jerks to strangers in my memory is incredibly heart warming. The absurdity, and inappropriate nature of the humour, would be fitting memorial and expression of who I was. I don’t know, maybe if I had gotten better grades I would feel differently.

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One Response to “In the event of my sudden death”

Oh, oh, oh! How about if my line is; “He had a thing for black slacks” now at first that sounds boring but when I say thing it’s going be emphasized and I’m going to raise my eyebrows and nod at the same time. Wait I don’t need your approval for this you’re going to be dead I’ll say whatever the hell I want. Wonder where I got the idea that I had to have permission, does this site exude some sort of mind controlling waves?